The Widow and the King Read Free Page B

feet scraped loudly on the moonlit flagstones.
    ‘I thought the Angels had sent you to me, Aun,’ he heard her say. He did not answer.
    The sky was clear. The moon was high overhead,pouring its colourless light over the world. Around him the buildings were drenched in silver. The peaks watched him, their faces marbled in grey and white. His own shadow was black on the paving beside him, squat and armoured, clinging to him like grief.
    He had left his living, his house and his manors, and maybe he would never return. One purpose alone remained to him. How could he give that up? How could he begin a goose-chase through the mountains while Raymonde, damned Raymonde, went free with his brother's blood on his hands and witchcraft that could bring the Kingdom down?
    And – and what good, what possible
good
would it do? What good could a man like him do for any child? His name was evil and his fatherhood cursed. The boy would be better without a man whose sons became men like Raymonde. Better to let him go where he was going – to those friends at Chatterfall, as like as not. Surely they would do well enough for him there, if he could get to them.
    And if he could not?
    Well … all men suffered equally in the end.
    It was Raymonde that mattered.
    He had strayed to the low wall that bounded the courtyard. Without thinking, he looked over and down. Under the wall was a drop of twenty or thirty feet to a slope, strewn with great stones, that declined steeply away from him – far, far away into dimness at the bottom of the valley. The light of the moon silvered the rocks and low thorns with elusive depth, as though it struck through clear water. The mountainside was vast, and still.
    Don't show yourself at the wall.
    The enemy – witchcraft!
    There, on the slope below him!
    They were man-sized but not man-shaped. Or if they were men, they were bagged and cowled in such a way that they might have been any shape. They were watching him.
    His blood was lurching. His hands gripped the stonework. Unthinking, his eye had begun to count them, as a man counts his enemies in the moments before the swords come out. Three, four … But
that
was not one of them. That was his own shadow – his head and shoulders rising above the shadow of the wall, which the moon had flung down among these creatures to look back up at him …
    One of the figures moved. It raised an arm – perhaps it was an arm – towards him. In the uncertain light he thought that its fingers were longer and thinner that any man's. It seemed to be trying, hopelessly from down there, to reach him. A feeling of appalling grief – grief and horror – washed though him, as if the thing had drawn its fingers across his heart. He looked into its face and could not see the eyes beneath its hood.
    His feet carried him away, stepping back from the wall. He tripped, but recovered. He was breathing hard. His hand went to the sword at his side, but it was not there. It lay beside his pillow, where his horse stood still in the moonlight. He was defenceless. He waited.
    Nothing happened.
    Nothing. They were watching, not attacking.
    I had bound them here, after Tarceny died.
    Fates, what things! What things – savage and lost and pitiful;
beckoning
to him!
    In the moonlight he looked at his hands, as if they might lengthen before his eyes and twist themselves into the terrible shapes that he had seen clawing the air from below.
    He was shaking.
    They're down there, he told himself. I am not. I am still a man.
    In his mind he saw the creature again, stretching its limb towards him.
Look
, it had seemed to say.
    Look. The man will let a son die. So that he may make his own son die.
    And his shadow had lain among them.
    He drew a long breath, and sought to shake his mind of what it had seen.
    Raymonde, he thought. But …
    Look. The man will let a son die.
    But …
    But if Raymonde had found what he wanted here, then Raymonde would be returning to the Kingdom now.
    So he must follow,